Scholars tend to understand the ‘Israel apartheid’ analogy as post-1960s phenomenon rooted in the rise of Third World internationalism and the influence of Palestinian intellectuals such as Fayez Sayegh. With the help of optical character recognition (OCR) software and Arabic newspaper archives, I show this consciousness has deeper roots. Palestinian newspaper writers in the 1920s-1940s demonstrated an awareness of Rhodesian settler colonialism and explicitly linked the Zionist project in Palestine to a larger British imperial pattern in southern Africa. Far from a contemporary invention by activists, the “Rhodesia-Israel” analogy coincided with or even predated the South African apartheid one. Furthermore, Arab journalism on Rhodesia was not isolated or unique but emerged in the context of a broader editorial commitment to inform Arab readerships in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa of issues of the day: Black American activism against lynchings, the Irish Republican cause, settler colonialism in Algeria, and Ethiopian resistance to Italian invasion. Furthermore, Zionists and Rhodesian settlers also employed the “Rhodesia-Israel” analogy, not as a critique or smear, but as a form of settler solidarity and affirmation of their political projects.

Citation:

Solomon, Richard. 2024 Before the Apartheid Analogy: Israel as ‘Second Rhodesia’. Working Paper. 

The question of the decline in Arabic science and the rise of the West has a long and storied history. In this article, I count manuscripts by author in different subject areas over time, using a 17th century Ottoman book catalogue Kashf al- Zanūn and Islamic manuscript records from over 2,500 libraries. The results of my linear and generalized differences-in-differences models support the Sunni Revival hypothesis, which argues that the political empowerment of Abbasid and Seljuk religious élite in the 11th and 12th centuries facilitated the spread of madrasa institutions, professionalized the ‘ulamā class of religious scholars, and channeled talent and state patronage away from empirical sciences and rationalist discourse. Science stagnated. 

I argue, however, that the medieval decline did not occur in the context of the ‘ulema’s opposition to science as part of a nakedly reactionary ideology. Nor did the madrassa college represent the unique institutional vehicle for the decline of science. The shift toward orthodoxy involved, rather, the acceptance and assimilation of scientific research into the heart of Islamic life. These findings cast doubt on narratives that attribute intellectual stagnation in the Islamic world to the Mongol, Spanish, and Crusader invasions, the Black Death, the Medieval Climate Anomaly, or modern European colonialism.

This was my M.A. thesis. It's under review currently at some journals. Citation:

Solomon, Richard. Arabic Science in Decline? Evidence from Counting Manuscripts. Thesis. University of Chicago, 2022.